Last Train Home
Every year 130 million Chinese migrant workers take leave from their city jobs to visit their home towns and their families over Chinese New Year, the largest human migration in the world. The film profiles Zhang Yang and Zhang Changhua, who left their impoverished Sichuan village when their daughter Qin was an infant (leaving her in her grandmother's care), to seek jobs in Guangzhou, 2100 km away. They work long hours sewing clothing in a garment factory, and live in cramped dormitory housing with little privacy. They returned every year to see their children, and thought of their far-away jobs as a sacrifice to assure a better life for them, but Qin sees them as near-strangers, and sees their sacrifice as neglect. Will the family pull together when the parents are back to see 16-year-old Qin?
Director Lixin Fan (who also served as cinematographer, an editor, and a camera operator) followed the Zhang family for three years, spending so much time with them that they largely forgot that the cameras were watching. That allowed him to get some amazing scenes of family drama. Other shots were impressive too: hordes of people crowding through train stations, or restlessly waiting while trains were delayed by technical difficulties; artistic shots of cities, rural landscapes along the train routes, and the beauty of the poor Sichuan farms the Zhang parents returned to visit.
The film did well at showing how the parents' peasant-in-the-city lives were primarily drudgery. However, there's a risk when a documentary tries to show the audience how its subjects' lives are dull: the film itself can turn dull. It can be difficult to illustrate tedium without inflicting the tedium on the audience, and at times the film fell into that trap. The film didn't need to spend as much time showing that it's pretty miserable to work year after year in the same repetitive job, in cramped quarters far, far from home, with only brief annual visits to see one's children.
Another fault was that the film depicted the farm back home as such a beautiful place that it was hard to get a sense for why anyone would leave. We know that it's because the farm labor can be back-breaking work, and that most of rural China is desperately poor, but the film didn't give the audience a sense of those problems.
I can see why many other reviews praised the film so highly. The imagery was often wonderful, the parents' sacrifice and their family drama was moving, and the broader story of the grand migration was interesting. But to me it felt like the film told too much of some aspects of a good story, and it seemed like there were other aspects of the theme that could have been presented that would have broadened the insight of the film's story. The film is a frustrating mix of excellent pieces that add up to a sum that's merely almost-good.
Language: Mandarin with English subtitles.
Rating: I don't think the film has a US rating, but it's suitable for anyone but those who are too young to read subtitles. The only material some would find objectionable is a fight that included some subtitled foul language.
Screening: Sunday, 2:30 pm, Seattle inner neighborhood (Egyptian).
Audience: About 20 in 590 seats (posted capacity was 476 last time I looked, but a manager said that was wrong).
Snacks: Popcorn.
Ads:
This film was a SIFF selection, but I missed it during SIFF.
Director Lixin Fan (who also served as cinematographer, an editor, and a camera operator) followed the Zhang family for three years, spending so much time with them that they largely forgot that the cameras were watching. That allowed him to get some amazing scenes of family drama. Other shots were impressive too: hordes of people crowding through train stations, or restlessly waiting while trains were delayed by technical difficulties; artistic shots of cities, rural landscapes along the train routes, and the beauty of the poor Sichuan farms the Zhang parents returned to visit.
The film did well at showing how the parents' peasant-in-the-city lives were primarily drudgery. However, there's a risk when a documentary tries to show the audience how its subjects' lives are dull: the film itself can turn dull. It can be difficult to illustrate tedium without inflicting the tedium on the audience, and at times the film fell into that trap. The film didn't need to spend as much time showing that it's pretty miserable to work year after year in the same repetitive job, in cramped quarters far, far from home, with only brief annual visits to see one's children.
Another fault was that the film depicted the farm back home as such a beautiful place that it was hard to get a sense for why anyone would leave. We know that it's because the farm labor can be back-breaking work, and that most of rural China is desperately poor, but the film didn't give the audience a sense of those problems.
I can see why many other reviews praised the film so highly. The imagery was often wonderful, the parents' sacrifice and their family drama was moving, and the broader story of the grand migration was interesting. But to me it felt like the film told too much of some aspects of a good story, and it seemed like there were other aspects of the theme that could have been presented that would have broadened the insight of the film's story. The film is a frustrating mix of excellent pieces that add up to a sum that's merely almost-good.
Language: Mandarin with English subtitles.
Rating: I don't think the film has a US rating, but it's suitable for anyone but those who are too young to read subtitles. The only material some would find objectionable is a fight that included some subtitled foul language.
Screening: Sunday, 2:30 pm, Seattle inner neighborhood (Egyptian).
Audience: About 20 in 590 seats (posted capacity was 476 last time I looked, but a manager said that was wrong).
Snacks: Popcorn.
Ads:
- HD Net concerts - An ad for a cable television channel might do more for me if I had cable television.
- Megamind - This ad tells me almost nothing about the movie except that it has something to do with superheroes, but Wikipedia tells that it's an animated comedy.
- Stella Artois - This wasn't nearly as entertaining as most Stella Artois ads, but it's still better than most beer ads.
- National Geographic's Great Migrations - This television event looks as good as any National Geographic special.
- Gilette - Usually ads that run in movie theaters are better than television ads, but this sports-themed ad is as stupid as standard television ads.
- Parker Spitzer - This television commentary show features some woman named Parker butting heads with Elliott Spitzer, the once-heroic attorney general who later disgraced himself as a governor by getting caught in a prostitution scandal.
- Cool It - This documentary features Bjørn Lomborg, the Danish writer who campaigned against An Inconvenient Truth on grounds that climate change was far from the most pressing environmental problem facing the world. The film was apparently finished before Lomborg changed attitudes on climate change.
- Waste Land - This documentary profiles people who search through the largest open trash dump in the world, with trash transformed into art. The film tied for SIFF's best documentary of 2010.
- Fair Game - This film is a thriller based on Valerie Plame's memoir about how the Bush administration tried to destroy her career in revenge for her husband's revelation that some of the key "evidence" used to justify the Iraq war had been falsified.
- Tibet in Song - During China's Cultural Revolution, Tibetan folk music was banned. Years later, a Tibetan man tried to go back to recover what was left of Tibetan culture, and got in trouble with Chinese authorities.
- Vision - The medieval German nun Hildegard von Bingen was a visionary intellectual, but she butted heads with the Church establishment.
This film was a SIFF selection, but I missed it during SIFF.